Last issue introduced some fun dice board games. This issue continues to bring some of the best dice game with dice as the protagonist.
1. Homebrewers
I love beer, so Homebrewers may be more important in my list than some of the others. But it is a fun little engine building game. The engine you are building is the beer you are creating. You do this by getting ingredient cards and adding them to your different beers. But dice plays a big role in it. The dice you get must clean up the mess you make when brewing. Give you ingredients, add ingredients. Give you grains for brewing, and brew your beer. So your roll is very important. However, if you roll almost all single symbols. There is a good dice relief. You can exchange dice with other players. Maybe I have two beers but no grains, and you have no beer and two grains. We can exchange one grain and one beer so that we can both brew. But maybe I think you are ahead. Your brewing helps you more than making a simple trade helps me. So instead, you can spend a dollar to change the face of the dice. The game plays quickly and feels like a filler-type engine building game. But it’s fun, and who doesn’t want to drink bacon nutmeg beer?
2. Criss Cross
The smallest game on the list, just rolling and writing on the list. This game is very simple and very dice driven. You place pairs of dice on your paper like dominoes, just like the others. You are trying to get symbols next to each other so that you can score in rows and columns. There seems to be an optimal solution that everyone will tend to form the dice. But you are free to place the pair of dice anywhere on the grid you want. And you can choose the symbol you want to put in a starting corner, because there are an odd number of squares. So the strategy and planning of the game will vary depending on whether you can match symbols next to each other at the beginning. Overall, this game is simple and plays quickly. But it’s a good little filler dice game.
3. Sagrada
Most of the games on the list, you are rolling dice and using them to solve certain problems. In Sagrada, you are rolling dice. Then drafting liquid core dice. Then using them to create stained glass windows. This sounds fun in itself, but then you have rules about where you can and can’t place the dice. The same numbers or the same colors can’t be orthogonally adjacent to each other (left-right and top-bottom). Also, at the start of the game you get to choose what stained glass window you want to make. This means you need to use certain colors in certain positions or at certain numbers. This locks in what you can choose. Can you grab the right dice or get them out of the bag so you can complete your stained glass window?
